Pastoral Ponderings— One drip at a Time…

Maple tapping like I was talking about last week, is a brief, intense time of year at the end of winter for that short time that conditions are just right, where everything happens right on top of each other.  This is year two of our maple tapping experiment, and we’re thoroughly enjoying the lessons we’re learning about tapping trees, the sweet end result, as well as the way the tasks associated with tapping push us to slow down and get out into God’s great world.

The other day when I was out collecting what is likely the last sap for the season from some of our trees, I got to thinking that if Jesus would have had maple trees in His neighborhood, He just might have had a parable or two based on tapping or making syrup.  The parable oozing out at me today had to do with the collecting process.

To collect the good stuff, as I mentioned last time, first you’ve got to tap into the right kind of trees.  As much as I love our walnut and oak trees, you’re not gonna get much maple sap out of those trees no matter how many taps you put in!  And secondly, even when you do tap into the right trees, it is still an art of quiet patience.  Too often we wait for the big and dramatic to be a sign of God’s voice—but just like with God’s “still, small voice,” there’s also nothing big, loud or dramatic about making syrup.  The sap you collect is just a small bit at a time that, if you’re patient and keep your taps in, the little drips eventually build up to enough to make for quite the blessing.

How often are we too impatient to just wait for the sweet stuff that God has to share and bless us with? Or, we only see a little drip of blessings, and that little bit leads us to think it not much of a blessing after all, or not enough to make it worthwhile to wait for more?  Be thankful every time your mouth is watering for real maple syrup that somebody out there cultivated the patience and trust that those little drips would eventually add up in big and tasty ways!

The assurance that little drips of blessings build up to so much more of God’s sweet grace for those who practice the art of quiet patience, these are wonderful clues from the maple trees to how God works to bring the Good Stuff into our lives.  Sure, sometimes God works in dramatic, glorious ways, but count the number of times we see that happening in the Bible as compared to the number of years of God’s quiet, small drips of blessings, and you might be surprised!  And if we’re called to be Christlike, might this be a clue, too, that the blessings we share with others might more often be shared in small doses?

Keep being a blessing—one drip at a time!  Pastor Jim

Pastoral Ponderings— Sweet Journey

Thanks to Rick Burt and that great big maple boiling pan, we were able to get most of our maple sap boiled down all in one day this past Saturday!  This is only our second year on our maple syrup tapping adventure, so we’re learning more each time, refining our processes each step of the way.  I’m pondering today how the various steps in making maple syrup might show us a little more about different facets of our life of discipleship.

First off, it’s amazingly simple, yet it takes almost constant attention, from first identifying the right trees to canning the final product.  Our life of discipleship is the same way—once we’ve identified that Jesus is the right one to tap into for the Sweet Life, a life of Discipleship is a life of intentionality every step of the way as we simply love God and love our neighbors.  The sap is free to whomever taps in—but you don’t get the Good Stuff by just standing around and looking at the trees!  So the next step in tapping after identifying the right trees, is to drill holes in the trees and insert the taps to get to the Good Stuff.  Likewise, you can’t get to the Good Stuff with Jesus by just looking at Him—you need to tap into Him in order to “abide in” Jesus and remain in that vine.

The blessings then start to flow!  But not always—the conditions need to be right—below freezing overnight, getting into the 40’s in the daytime. Like the dynamics of the weather required for the sap to flow, our tapping into Jesus is also a dynamic source of flowing blessings, when we stay in the right environment.

The sap then needs to be boiled down—refined by fire.  The Good Stuff is already in the sap, but it is not fully released except through that refining by fire.  Part of our faith journey, too, involves being refined by fire, by hard testing, because while the Good Stuff of the transforming grace of Jesus is already there, the testing brings out the sweet transformation of our Journey with Jesus.

So next time you pour some syrup on your pancakes or whatever, use the syrup as a reminder of how we grow in our faith—simple, yet an on-going, intentional journey.  And then we can enjoy the Sweet Life of abiding in Jesus through it all!

Pastor Jim

Pastoral Ponderings- Bloom where you’re Planted

I was visiting with one of our church’s angels at the rehab center, where, among other things, she said that between hospital and rehab stays, she’s not been home since the day after Christmas.  If anybody could complain, it might be her, and while she did say she’s eager to get home, she didn’t dwell on that eagerness to leave.  What came up in our conversation much more were the people taking care of her that she’s been able to share God’s blessings with, either from her bed, her wheelchair, or sometimes even while on foot carefully walking around the facility to build up her strength again.

SHE is the one trying to get back in good enough shape to go home, yet she is also the one sharing God’s blessing with those around her!  What a gal!  Would that we could all have that kind of spirit!  As that well-known passage in Ecclesiastes reminds us, there’s a time for everything under the sun, but neither does that text say nor imply that there’s NOT a time to be a blessing for others!  More like regardless of whatever time you’re going through, it’s always a time to be a blessing.  Even in the hospital or in rehab.

So what about the rest of us who are NOT down and out these days—how is it that we would rather play the “poor little ol’ me” game, despite our countless blessings, than use the time God has given us, wherever we find ourselves, to bless others?  Think about it—who was the last person that you found a way to bless today—or was it last week, last month, or further back?  If that little angel can do it day after day from a hospital bed or rehab center, why can’t we, as we interact with others every day?

Our little angel is a great demonstration of the old cliché to “bloom where you’re planted” in a spiritual way, and a great reminder that we can all find ways to bless others wherever we find ourselves.  Perhaps it’s like the God Sightings we talk about at church—it’s not like there’s a shortage of ways God is working in and through our lives every day, it’s more a problem of noticing.  LOOK FOR how God is working every day around you, and it’s then easier to notice as well, ways small and large, for how we can be God’s hands, feet, smiling lips and loving heart for those around us—not JUST on special occasions, but every day.

Keep being a blessing—wherever you’re planted!  Pastor Jim

Pastoral Ponderings—Ice and Discipleship

I’m so glad we didn’t have the freezing rain last night that was expected! I don’t mind the cold that much, and love the snow, and if the ice could just stay in the trees, in pretty icicles, or in my glass, I could be fine with ice, too, but I’m not so excited about ice on the roads or sidewalks!  Even though the prediction for freezing rain did not come to pass, one of the good things about ice is generally how predictable it is.

Nothing fancy there—when it gets cold enough, it freezes, when it warms up, it melts.  We sometimes have that narrow range like last night, when, if conditions are just so, as was likely, we’d get ice, unless it doesn’t turn out that way.  But we generally we don’t live in that narrow range, so when it’s cold enough, it freezes, then it melts when it gets warm.

You might think I’m a little off when I put ice and discipleship together like this, but Christian discipleship, too, is generally pretty predictable— if you follow the formula, you get discipleship: pray, read scripture, love God, love people, make other Jesus people your close circle of influence, and you grow in your discipleship.  Sure, there’s always the exceptional circumstances where the “formula” doesn’t work as expected, but like our predicted freezing rain that didn’t happen, that gray area of variability is pretty small. And since we don’t live the gray area that much, the formula almost always works: do this, this and this, and your grow in your faith.

It’s pretty predictable.  So why do we try to live in the gray and explain away why we’re not growing in our Jesus walk?  The Jesus life also tends to be contagious—not all the time, but very often–just live Jesus, and invite others to join the party, and we see results.

Keep on praying, keep on listening for the voice of God through the scriptures, keep on loving, and when you grow in your discipleship enough to glow—to let your little light shine—invite others to the party!  Or to put it another way, remember the way Jesus put it as we read and talked about on Sunday—“Abide in my love… so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” (John 15: 10-11)

Living in the Light—Pastor Jim

Pastoral Ponderings—“Welcome Home”- Jan. 17, 2024

We heard the greeting “Welcome home!” countless times in I couldn’t tell you how many different settings when we were at Disney this past week.  Sounds like it must be one of their new things these days.  Despite the fact the I know it must be some kind of marketing ploy, it’s still a powerful phrase that resonates on multiple levels.  But how can you call Disney “home” so that the greeting can in any way make sense, when none of us really live there?  Yet the term still fits in wonderful ways.

The Disney/Pixar movie “Inside Out” talks about “core memories”– those memories that stay with us, and somehow help shape us– to the extent that one of the Disney shirts I saw many times walking around the parks read “This is a Core Memory Day.”  Disney’s movies, and the whole idea of their “Magic Kingdom” that is such a draw for many of us, leads me to want to describe our trips there more as a pilgrimage than a vacation. For many, facets of Disney form huge chunks of the fabric of our lives.  So maybe “welcome home” fits.  At least it does for us, and it certainly has a positive, powerful feel to it.

It takes getting away like this to our Disney “home” to realize that maybe the same is true for the church, and the Kingdom of God that Jesus talks about.  Is it too bold to say that I think Disney in some ways tries to emulate the welcoming grace of the Kingdom of God with their claim to be “most magical place on earth?”  Maybe we could re-evaluate how we think of and how we do church, that it might do us as well as it does Disney, to use the phrase in the same way for our guests, greeting them as well with a warm “welcome home!”

One of my Army buddies in the Cincinnati area is considering starting a church that doesn’t really fit the mold.  He’s toying with ways to describe what he’d like to start, and offered this starting point– “if you are into Jesus, into loving others… a bit more open and a bit less judgmental, let’s talk.”  In our contentious, broken and often offensive world today, shouldn’t a place that feels warm and welcoming, rather than abrasive and divisive, have a wonderfully attractive sense of “home” that we so often yearn for?  I’m SO proud to say that our church family (in all three locations!) DOES exude that kind of welcoming  warmth.

So we are blessed to be able to bring God’s kind of magic into our communities, and can honestly say to those who are lost, hurt, searching, the least, the last, the lost—“welcome home.”  I hope you can feel that reality too, so that you, too, can be comfortable and excited about welcoming others into the warmth of God’s grace in our places of worship.  Keep up the good work, and keep sharing the fantasmic blessing of God’s family that Jesus has welcome us into, and welcomes others into as well! —Pastor Jim

Pastoral Ponderings—Stuck 

We awoke early this morning to get ready to run away together for a little while—on a pilgrimage to the Magic Kingdom at Disney.  Our son was giving us a lift on his way to work, so we spent the night with the newlywed couple, and minutes after we started moving this morning, I heard this awful exclamation—never a good thing—when Darling Wife broke the quiet of the morning calling out “WHAT?!?”

The flight was delayed. Not just a little bit, but from a 9:30 AM flight, to a 7:30 PM flight!  Quite the wrench in our plans for an easy, relaxing flight.

But despite the long delay, Kristopher still had to get to work at the same time, so we still arrived early, tried our best to fight the inevitable, but now, waiting.  Thank God for the USO!

Ironically, I was just reading up on a resilience author for an opportunity to better connect with the Southeast Schools (Charlestown Church and Ravenna footprint—where they had a student suicide just before Thanksgiving), who was talking about the importance of mental flexibility for resilience.  In other words, how flexible can you be when a wrench gets thrown into your plans?  And how often does THAT happen?  Whether something as relatively inane as a flight delay (annoying though it may be), to major disappointments and losses, life is chock full of wrenches chucked into our plans.

Resilience, or how we bounce back when Bad Things happen, is not just a psychological, but a spiritual skill set as well.  I’ve spent a lot of my career dealing with suicide, usually precipitated by what seems to be a major wrench thrown in the middle of a vulnerable life.  What might be just a Bad Day to someone with good resilience—being dumped by a girlfriend or something—can be deadly if it shakes your sense of meaning and a place in this world.

If not for our faith, are we anything other than a cosmic accident?  So when life gets messy, why bother?  Unless there’s something more to life—as our faith boldly asserts, proclaiming that we are treasured children of the God of all creation, also called to make a difference in making God’s love real for those who might feel like the least, the last, the lost.  And for whom even difficult times can be filled with spiritual blessings.

We’re still not excited about the wrench thrown into our plans—but I’m getting to overhear Darling Wife being a blessing in conversation with others while I’m being able to catch up on a long to do list, and keeping my eyes open for other God Sightings that will come from this delay.  How do you handle the wrenches chucked into your life?   Still waiting… Pastor Jim

Pastoral Ponderings—Happy New Year…

The day dawned just like any other—and yet, not.  This day had never ever come before, and was so absolutely unique, that it would never come again.  In some ways, it seemed like such an ordinary day, yet it marked the end of everything else that had ever come before, while at the same time, it was a beautiful new beginning.  It was such a brief flash in the cosmic pan that though it was such a dramatic day, it was over almost as quickly as it had begun.  Happy new year—and a perfectly unique opportunity to start everything new.  Yet the same thing could be said of every single day of your life!

I don’t think our cats were all that excited about a new year dawning.  It might even have been annoying to them as our celebrations interrupted their sleep (they don’t get to their wild playing until after about 3 am).  I didn’t see any of the squirrels, chipmunks, deer or turkey in the area partying wildly either, so why do we?  Are we just that eager to have a new start that we make sure we have it in our calendars every year?

Yet the Great God of all creation invites us all to a new start with Jesus, and with everything that really matters, any time we need it!  Maybe that’s why I’ve never gotten all that excited about New Year’s Eve—it’s a little artificial—where the opportunity for a new start with God is as real as real can get, and you don’t have to wait for the calendar to come around to that opportunity again.  And that’s a good thing, because New Year’s Day is as slow as Christmas!

Not that there’s anything wrong with enjoying a good party, so I hope you had a good one!  But remember that the best part of any new year’s celebration, the new start that it offers, is available EVERY day, or at least every day with journey with Jesus!  So if you’re afraid you’ll not be able to make it through January with your New Year’s resolution, or even if you’ve already messed up your new year—fear not, for behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people—unto you is offered this day, a new start, as fresh as a newborn baby, only a prayer away!  For this is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!  Pastor Jim